Today we give a quick once over to the Gigabyte Z87X UD4H, which is soon to be released. Looking at the past, the UD4 boards have been Gigabyte's mid-range performance motherboards, settling itself rather logically between the UD3 and the UD5. However, in the history of all things UD4, nothing's looked quite as good as this.

Last generation's boards bucked the trend when it came to overclocking performance with price in mind, with boards in the £150 range beating those with a greater price tag. We can only hope that this happens with this board, just so that it gets the power as well as the looks. Only time will tell, but the board is already promising in our eyes.

Once again, let's take a look at some photos of the board before we get to the video.

Pictures

Stunning. Just stunning.

A close up of the VRM heatsinks show even more good looks.

The first board that we've seen today which includes a PCI lane along with PCIe.

Video

Conclusion

Oh me, oh my. If you haven't already caught on from the rest of this article, we're totally infatuated with the looks of this thing. Red and black is a new colour scheme for Gigabyte, and might we say that they've pulled it off flawlessly. The heatsinks show off their simplicity well, with no added logos or badges in the way of the sleek aesthetics.

Gravitating away from its looks towards what the board has to offer in terms of PCIe lanes, we see something different from the other boards we've covered recently - a PCI lane! Good for those of you who still rock older components; the PCI lane will still be good for many sound cards and, if you really wanted to, a video card. Moving on to the PCIe lanes we have three full sized lanes which are wired as 16x, 8x, and 4x, along with two 1x lanes. We have to be very clear here - we do not know yet how the chipset is going to use these lanes, as that's still covered under Intel's NDA.

This board, as it is a lower end item compared to the Snipers, does not benefit from the upgraded audio circuitry. It still offers its own onboard HD audio solution, but it won't be up to par with the others in terms of quality sound reproduction. This is most likely done to cut costs for the mid-range board, but it's still a shame that it's missing.

All together we can see this board being hugely popular among end users. Its breathtaking looks paired with what we hope to be great performance and price will set it up to be one of the top sellers in our eyes, and we really can't wait to see it being put into rigs after release.

A big thanks to Gigabyte for sending us this board for our hands-on preview. Discuss this topic further in the OC3D Forums.